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Over the last few weeks I’ve found myself reflecting a lot on how much has changed in the educational landscape and my own thinking since What Readers Really Docame out two and a half years ago. And having also spent some time last month working with Lucy West, Toni Cameron and the amazing team of math coaches that form the Metamorphosis Teaching Learning Communities, I want to share some new thoughts I’ve been having about the whole idea of scaffolding.

From what I could gather from a quick look at (yes, I admit it) Wikipedia, the idea of scaffolding goes back to the late 1950’s when the cognitive psychologist Jerome Bruner used it to describe young children’s language acquisition. And by the 1970’s Bruner’s idea of scaffolding became connected with Vygotsky’s concept of a child’s zone of proximal development and the idea that “what the child is able to do in collaboration today he will be able to do independently tomorrow.”

Even before the Common Core Standards, teachers have been encouraged to scaffold by using scaffolding moves like those listed below (which were culled from several websites):

Activating students’ prior knowledge

Introducing a text through a short summary or synopsis

Previewing a text through a picture walk

Teaching key vocabulary terms before reading

Creating a context for a text by filling in the gaps in students’ background knowledge

Offering a motivational context (such as visuals) to pique students interest or curiosity in the subject at hand

Breaking a complex task into easier, more “doable” steps to facilitate students achievement

Modeling the thought process of students through a think aloud

Offering hints or partial solutions to problems

Asking questions while reading to encourage deeper investigation of concepts

Modeling an activity for the students before they’re asked to complete the same or similar one

As I looked at in last year’s post on Common Core-aligned packaged programs, scaffolding these days has been ratcheted up even more, with teachers more or less being asked to do almost anything (including doing a think-aloud that virtually hands over the desired answer) to, in the words of one program, “guide students to recognize” and “be sure students understand” something specific in the text. And, for me, that raises the question: What is all that scaffolding really helping to erect or construct? Is it a strong, flexible and confident reader who’s able to independently understand all sorts of texts? Or is it a particular understanding of a particular text as demonstrated by some kind of written performance-based task product?

If we think about what’s left standing when the scaffolding is removed, it seems like we’re erecting the latter, not the former—though in What Readers Really Do, Dorothy Barnhouse and I attempted to change that by making a distinction between what we saw as a prompt and a scaffold, which can be seen in this chart from the book:

Most of the scaffolding moves listed above don’t, however, follow this distinction. Many solve the problems for the students and are also intended to lead students to the same conclusion—a.k.a. answer—as the teacher or the program has determined is right. I’m all for reclaiming or rehabilitating words, but given that the Common Core’s Six Shifts in Literacy clearly states that teachers should “provide appropriate and necessary scaffolding” (italics mine) so that students reading below grade level can close read complex texts, redefining the word scaffold may be a bit like Sisyphus trying to push that boulder uphill. So I’ve been thinking (and here’s where the math folks come in) about recasting the kinds of scaffolds Dorothy and I shared in our book as what my math colleagues call models.

Models in math are used not only as a way of solving a problem but of understanding the concepts beneath the math (which Grant Wiggins has just explored in a great “Granted, and. . . ” blog post). Here, for instance, are two models for multiplication: The first is a number line which shows how multiplication can be thought of as particular quantity of another quantity (in this case, three groups of five each), and the second the Box Method, or an open array, shows how large numbers can broken down into more familiar and manageable components and their products then added up. Each model is being used here to solve a particular problem, but each can be immediately transferred and applied to similar problems:

And here’s a text-based Know/Wonder chart that records the thinking of a class of 5th graders as they read the first chapter of Kate DiCamillo’s wonderful The Tiger Rising(and—sneak peak—will be appearing in my next book):

Like the math models, it references the specifics of a particular text, but it’s also a model for solving certain kinds of problems—in this case, how readers figure out what’s going on at the beginning of a complex texts and develop questions they can use as lines of inquiry as they keep reading. In effect, the chart makes visible what those students were “able to do in collaboration” that day that they’ll “be able to do independently tomorrow,” because, whether we call it a scaffold or a model, it’s directly and immediately transferrable to other texts that pose the same problem.

In the end I don’t think it really matters what we call this kind of support, but I do think we have to ask ourselves what, exactly, we’re scaffolding or modeling. Are we helping students get a particular answer to a particular problem or text in order to produce a particular assignment? Or are we, instead, really offering a replicable process of thinking that’s tied to the concepts of a discipline, which can start being transferred tomorrow not an at indeterminate point in the future? Of course, that raises the question of what the underlying concepts in reading are, which we don’t talk about as much as my math colleagues do for math. But that I’ll need to save for another day . . . .

On those days when book writing is hard, I sometimes sneak over to twitter and blogs to feel both distracted and connected. And last month I noticed that many educators were passionately tweeting and posting about what can often feel like an endangered species, independent reading.

All the tweeting and blogging about independent reading may be connected to the balanced literacy bashing I wrote about in my last post, as teachers raise their voices to counter what feels to many of us like a misinformed assault. For if nothing else, balanced literacy does what virtually none of the Common Core Standards packaged reading programs do: It structurally carves out time for independent reading—and I mean independent reading of books students choose, not whole class books they’re required to read often out of school for homework; the kind of reading that promotes a love of reading, without which too many students can see reading as a chore.

That’s not to say that some of those programs don’t note the importance of independent reading, but it’s usually mentioned as a footnote or an aside, not as a central component. And given the amount of time it takes to implement those programs, it takes a real commitment on the part of the teachers and schools to keep independent reading alive in classrooms—despite the fact that students who self-identify as readers who regularly read for pleasure consistently score higher on standardized tests than those who don’t, and they participate more in the civic life that’s needed for democracies to thrive. And as I’ve seen first hand, without that commitment from teachers and schools, independent reading vanishes within a shocking short period of time as students stop carrying books in their backpacks and don’t talk about them in the hall and fewer and fewer think of themselves as readers and libraries start looking forlorn.

And so this week, I want to share some links I recently read or viewed that speak to both the power of independent reading and the power of teachers who dedicate themselves to changing students views about reading.

Colette led me to Penny Kittle‘s video for Heinemann “Why Students Don’t Read What’s Assigned in Class,” which was the inspiration for her post. There you’ll see students candidly speak about how and why they’ve virtually stopped reading before arriving in a classroom with a teacher who, like Nancie Atwell, believes that “The job of adults who care about reading is to move heaven and earth to put that book into a child’s hands.”

Then there’s Justin Stygles‘s “5th Grade Summer Readers,” in which he recounts his experience with some summer school students who’ve developed a hatred of reading, committing himself to trying to turn the tide against reading around.

And finally, here’s a link to “SparkNotes Nation,” a post I wrote over a year ago about work I did with a high school teacher who wanted to bring some choice and meaning back to students who, like Penny’s, had become quite adept at avoiding reading.

As the New York Times reported the other week, our new Schools Chancellor Carmen Farina recently gave a big endorsement to balanced literacy, which had been cast aside in many city schools after the previous administration embraced packaged reading programs, such as Pearson ReadyGen, Scholastic Codex and Core Knowledge, that were supposedly Common Core aligned. Many of these programs’ claims have since been called into question, but it’s Carmen Farina’s words that seem to have ushered us into a new stage in the reading wars. And from where I sit it’s gotten kind of ugly.

An op-ed piece in yesterday’s New York Times, for instance, called balanced literacy “an especially irresponsible approach,” while a commentary appearing in the Thomas B. Fordham Institute’s blog “Flypaper” called it a “hoax” and likened it to “the judo-like practice of using terms that appeal to an audience as fig leaves for practices that same audience would find repugnant.” And over at “Used Books in Class,” my friend, colleague and fellow blogger Colette Bennett takes a look at another “Flypaper” writer who’s “recast the phrase ‘balanced literacy’ in mythological terms, as a hydra,” coming to get us. That’s a lot of virulent language for a pedagogical term.

“[The teacher] took her perch in front of a class of restless fourth graders and began reciting the beginning of a book about sharks. But a few sentences in, [she] shifted course. She pushed her students to assume the role of teacher, and she became a mediator, helping guide conversations as the children worked with one another to define words like ‘buoyant’ and identify the book’s structure.”

And here’s an excerpt from “What Does a Good Common Core Lesson Look Like?” a story that appeared on NPR’s education blog, which also includes a classroom anecdote. The NPR piece looks at a ninth grade class that’s beginning to read Karen Russell’s short story “St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves,” which I wrote about earlier. This time, however, we’re told that we’re seeing close reading in action, not balanced literacy:

“First the teacher reads an excerpt of the story aloud . . . Then, students turn to individual close reading. They are told to reread sections and draw boxes around unfamiliar words [and] . . . after they have gotten to know the story well, students pair up to tease out the meaning of words like lycanthropic, couth and kempt.”

I hope I’m not the only one out there who thinks that, in all the really important ways, these two anecdotes are just alike. In the words of the ninth grade teacher quoted by NPR, both teachers are trying to “create content where there is a productive struggle… where all students are being asked to work toward the same target as everyone else” rather than “mak[ing] sure they see everything that’s cool about the text.”

Of course I have some questions about whether that struggle should all be spent on vocabulary words instead of a text’s deeper meaning. And I would never begin the class as the ninth grade teacher does by discussing the standards with the students since I think the standards are for us, not for them. But the point I want to make here is that balanced literacy is an instructional structure, just as close reading is (or has become). And while I personally love balanced literacy because giving students a combination of whole class, small group and independent experiences just makes sense to me, what’s really important is not what structure a teacher uses, but how he or she uses it to help students read meaningfully and deeply. And that reminds me of a quote I shared a while ago from the authors of the great book Making Thinking Visible:

“Rather than concerning ourselves with levels among different types of thinking, we would do better to focus our attention on the levels of quality within a single type of thinking. For instance, one can describe at a very high and detailed level or at a superficial level. Likewise . . . analysis can be deep and penetrating or deal with only a few readily apparent features.”

I think the same is true about teaching approaches and structures: We’d do better to focus on the quality and depth that’s brought to a structure—i.e., what kind of thinking are we asking of students within whatever structure we use—rather than get caught up fighting over which one is better, knowing that a teacher who really listens to students, reflects on her practice and is a critical thinker and learner herself can make almost anything work.

And now that that’s off my chest, I want to share something else: I’m working on a new book on reading that I plan to finish by the end of the year. That doesn’t mean I’m bowing out of blogging, if for no other reason than writing a blog post is so much easier than writing a book. And I love the immediacy of it and the connection with other teachers and readers. But while I may be posting less frequently, I’ll still be trying to wrap my mind in words that speak to the things we all care about.

In the flurry of getting ready to leave for Spain, the release from the grip of news cycles while away and the catch-up game of coming home to scores of voice messages and emails, I missed the fact that Maxine Greene, champion of the imagination and the arts in education, died last month at the age of 93. My dear friend Mary Ehrenworth introduced me to her when we were writing The Power of Grammartogether, and strangely enough I found myself thinking of her while I was away. Knowing now that she’d died, it’s tempting to wonder if some energy was released by her parting that I felt a whole ocean away. But then I was only aware of my desire to follow her injunction to “notice what there is to be noticed” and to live in a state of what she called “wide-awakeness,” being fully present, receptive and curious to everything around me.

Traveling, I think, invites wide-awakeness, especially if you give yourself permission to ignore the calls of the digital world, which I more or less managed to do. We also decided to forgo the guided or audio tours offered at sites and museums in order to, in Greene’s words, “notice what there is to be noticed without imposing alien readings or interpretations.” That allowed us to feel the thrill of discovering sites on our own, like the moment when I noticed that one of the columns in Gaudi’s fabulous viaduct in Barcelona’s Parc Guell had morphed into a stone woman before I read anything about it,

From Vicki’s iPad in Parc Guell, Barcelona 2014

and when it dawned on me that we must be in Girona’s old medieval Jewish Quarter because I kept noticing menorahs.

Of course, relying on our eyes instead of a guidebook meant that we missed a thing or two, but it allowed us to attend to other things, like the shadow of a lantern cast on the floor of the Girona cathedral,

and the delightful details we noticed on an 11th century tapestry, in which Adam and Eve stood alongside Apollo and turtles looked like cats.

We stood in front of that tapestry, drinking it in for quite some time in what I think Maxine Greene would call an “aesthetic encounter.” According to Greene,

“Opening ourselves to encounters with the arts awakens us, prepares us for deeper living because our imagination is at work, and with imagination, a possibility of our transformation.”

In this case, we tried to imagine the lives and beliefs of the artists who created the tapestry as well as the world they inhabited and to also probe why and how the piece spoke to us so deeply across so many centuries. And as happened with everything we noticed, we had a lot of questions, which Greene says is a natural outcome of any aesthetic encounter.

To answer some of those questions, we did sometimes turn to guidebooks or google (which helped us figure out what some of the mysterious symbols meant on the appliances in the apartment we rented). But many of our questions, like what the origami butterflies were for, remained a mystery. And while we did consult maps and bike route signs, it was often what we stumbled on when we were lost that was the most memorable, whether it was the tiled water foundation we noticed in an eerily empty Catalonia village right when we needed more water,

Transitioning back now from vacation to work mode, it seems important to note that, as an educator, Greene envisioned having these aesthetic experiences not while traveling but in classrooms. And to provide those experiences to students, she believed that a teacher’s “educative task” was set students up to notice what there is to be noticed by creating opportunities that “nurture appreciative, reflective, cultural, participatory engagement with works of art,” along with “situations in which the young are moved to begin to ask, in all tones of voice there are, ‘Why?'”

Like the rich tasks I wrote about a few months ago, these situations and opportunities don’t have to involve extensive planning. They can be folded into practices and structures you already have in your room, such as reading conferences, simply by changing the questions we ask students. A 9th grade teacher I worked with, for instance, wanted to re-instate independent reading, which had been pushed aside in his classroom in favor of ‘complex’ whole class texts that many of his students couldn’t access. To keep his students accountable, he considered asking them to keep track of the literary elements in their books, and I asked if we could see what happened instead if we asked students what they noticed and what they made of that.

Game but skeptical, the teacher sat down next to me as I conferred with a student named Alex who was on the opening page of Gary Soto’s story “Broken Chain” from the collection Baseball in April—and in 9th grade, was only at a 5th grade reading level.

I began by asking Alex if anything had stood out for him on this page, and Alex responded by shrugging his shoulders. So I asked if he’d consider reading it again and see if he noticed anything that seemed interesting, confusing, cool, weird, or anything else to him. This time Alex pointed to the line about Alfonso wanting to look like the Aztec warrior from the calendar, which he said was really weird.

I asked him then if he could say more about why he thought that was weird, and after pausing just long enough for me to worry that all I’d get was another shrug, he said this: “I think this guy cares too much about what other people think of him. And that picture’s probably not even real; I bet those cuts are air-brushed in. He should be okay with who he is.”

I believe that Gary Soto’s stories are works of art and that, when I gave Alex the opportunity, he started engaging with the story in the appreciative, reflective, and wide-awake way Maxine Greene says is needed if we, as teachers, are “concerned for teaching rather than training, for persons in their pluralities rather than potentional ‘job-holders and consumers’.” She also has these words to say to us, which seem important to keep in mind:

“To provoke students to break through the limits of the conventional and the taken for granted, we ourselves have to experience breaks with what has been established in our own lives; we have to keep arousing ourselves to begin again.”

Summer is a wonderful time to break with the conventional, whether you’re traveling or curling up with a great book. So with thanks to the wonderful Maxine Greene, here’s to noticing what there is to be noticed, staying wide-awake to all that’s around us, and opening ourselves up to new encounters.

This week I’m heading off to Spain for a do-it-yourself cycling vacation. Several friends and colleagues urged me to blog from there, and while I certainly might if the beach, the bike trails and the tapas aren’t beckoning, their urging got me thinking about why I’m doing this—as in , why am I spending more money than I should to fly to a place I’ve never been to before, where they speak a language (Catalan) I don’t know a word of, to ride from 20 to 60 miles a day in unflattering spandex, with no sag wagon behind us to help us up the hills rather than, say, remodeling my kitchen or going on a clothes-buying spree? There are probably several factors in my psyche that might explain what at times feels like a crazy thing to do, but as I started mulling the why question over, I think it has to do with reading.

The great Russian writer Tolstoy once said that literature is always one of two basic stories: either a person goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town. The novel I wrote was of the latter kind, with the stranger being the young Rudyard Kipling who came to Brattleboro, Vermont, with a pregnant wife, hardly any money, and the seed of a story that would eventually become The Jungle Book. But as a reader, I seem to gravitate to the former. As a child, for instance, my favorite fairy tale was Hans Christian Anderson’s “The Snow Queen,” where brave little Gerta travels to the land of ice to rescue her dear friend from the clutches of the Snow Queen (and which inspired two great recent children’s books, Breadcrumbs by Anne Ursu and Ophelia and the Marvelous Boy by Karen Foxlee).

And then there were all those classic journey books I couldn’t get enough of: A Wrinkle in Time, The Chronicles of Narnia, The Hobbit,The Phantom Tollbooth. Thinking back to those books now, I realized that each book’s main characters were on some sort of a quest, whether intentionally like A Wrinkle in Time’s Meg, who longed to find her missing father, or unintentionally like the children in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe who accidentally stumbled into a portal to a magic land. And reminded of that, I found myself wondering if I, too, was on a quest—and if so, a quest for what?

That question led me back to my bookshelf where I searched for a story by the writer Evan S. Connell I remembered reading many year ago. The story was called “The Walls of Avila” and it was about a group of men from the Midwest who’d been childhood friends. All of them had stayed in the town they’d grown up in except for one named J.D., who’d spent more than a decade wandering through Europe, North Africa and the Middle East. When J.D. comes back for a brief visit, the others regard him with a mix of bafflement and judgment. They can’t understand why he’d chosen to live the itinerate way he did, even when he tries to explain it, as the narrator of the story recounts here in the passage I’d been l looking for:

He had explained that the difference between our town and these other places he had been was that when you go walking down a boulevard in some strange land and you see a tree burgeoning, you understand that this is beautiful, and there comes with this knowledge a moment of indescribable poignance in the realization that as this tree must die, so will you die. But when, in the home you have always known, you find a tree in bud you think only that spring has come again.

I don’t think I seek out foreign places to be reminded that I’ll die; nor do I think you can’t find those moments in your own backyard, as another journey book character Dorothy discovered after spending some time in Oz. But I do think those moments of “indescribable poignance” are what I’m after on my journeys whether they’re to a foreign country, a classroom or a book: I want to be in the presence of something beautiful that speaks to fragility and the endurance of this amazing world of ours.

As for the traveling by bicycle, I can actually pinpoint the exact moment I decided I wanted to do that. And it came from reading, too. Beyond phonics worksheet I don’t really recall anything from my elementary years that resembles real reading instruction. But in sixth grade my class used an SRA reading program, which meant that during ‘reading’ we’d each go to a box on the windowsill and pick a color-coded text on a piece of cardboard to read and answer questions about. I remember the colors—teal and ocher—more than the actual texts. But there was one I vividly remember about the American Youth Hostel organization, which described how you could travel from hostel to hostel in amazing places by bicycle. From that a life was born.

I imagine I’m not the only one whose life feels shaped by reading. And while, with all those adventures ahead, I might not get to blogging, I would love to read other readers’ stories about how reading shaped their lives. So share a story by leaving a comment. And now I have to go.

As we head into June, much of my time seems devoted to tying up loose ends and reflecting back on the year. And with loose ends and reflection in my mind, I’d like to share four resources I discovered over the school year that I couldn’t seem to find a home for in another post.

The first is Cecil, the Pet Glacier, a delightfully quirky picture book written by Matthea Harvey and illustrated by Giselle Potter, that someone recommended to me a while ago. It sat on my bookshelf for quite some time before I decided to try it out as a read aloud in a third grade class this spring. And it turned out to be a wonderful book for engaging students in the process of meaning making that Dorothy Barnhouse and I explored in What Readers Really Do.

The book is about a girl named Ruby who, unlike her unique but self-absorbed parents (mom makes tiaras and dad creates topiaries), wants only to be normal. The class’s teacher wasn’t sure that her students would know what a tiara or a topiary was, let alone a glacier, and she also wondered if they’d get a book about a child who was embarrassed by her parents. She was game, though, to try it out and so we decided not to front-load any vocabulary but see how much the kids could figure out. This meant that many at first thought that the strange white object on the cover might be a package containing a pet. And while some thought that on the page below Ruby hoped that no one from school would see her because she was playing with dolls, others wondered if it was because she was didn’t want anyone seeing her parents, who had been shown on the page before dancing the tango through the topiaries in tiaras.

We continued reading with those questions about Ruby’s motives and her parents in mind, with the students continually revising their ideas as they encountered new details. And that allowed the students to not only ‘get’ what a glacier was but what they thought Matthea Harvey was trying to show them about parents, relationships, growing up and what it means to be different and normal.

The second resource is connected to my love affair with visuals that I wrote about here and here: a wonderful website called The Creativity Core, where high school teacher Daniel Weinstein shares some of the visual mind maps his students have created in both his class and others. Many of these can be used as great mentor texts for note-taking, which as this student’s mind map about mind mapping says can be “a dull and boring process that often leaves students drooling on their books.”

Instead, mind maps invite students not just to copy but to think about where and how they’re writing down what in ways that can help them own and retain the content they’re learning more deeply. Here, for instance, is an example of a student’s psychology class notes where, in addition to capturing the main ideas of different schools of thought, she demonstrates true understanding of the content by the way she’s posed the question at the top of the page “Why did the woman kill the man?”, then answered it by applying the different perspectives, such as “The id took over,” which you’ll see at the bottom of her notes for the Psychoanalytic perspective.

And here’s a mind map one of Daniel Weinstein’s student made that captures the writing advice Weinstein gave the class in a way that I think shows how much it’s valued. (Makes me wonder what students and teachers might include in a mind map of things they heard me say!)

The power of creativity is also on display in the third resource I’d like to share: the new ebook from my friends at the Opal School in Portland, Creating Possible Worlds: The Teacher’s Role in Nurturing a Community Where Imagination Thrives. The book documents a year-long study of seeds that was facilitated by preschool teachers Lauren Adams and Caroline Wolfe. The project was framed around a series of questions that the teachers explored as the children explored seeds. And while these questions evolved as the project did, all were connected to the teachers initial inquiry questions:

“What is our image of children and how do we, as teacher-researchers deepen our understanding of our values through reflecting on our daily practice and decision-making in the classoom?

What are the elements of a classroom culture that supports playful inquiry and sustained curiosity? And what is the teacher’s role in this?

What habits of heart and mind are being practiced and embodied by both the children and the adults through this experience?”

Throughout the book the teachers share their thoughts about these questions—and what new questions these thoughts raised—while also sharing their children’s thinking about seeds. Here, for instance, are two children exchanging some of their ideas and questions:

I love the one child’s questions—”What’s inside? A tree is inside?”—and the way the other makes sense of the world by using figurative language—”This one is like the inside of a tulip” and “It’s where the baby plant comes out. It’s like the belly button of a bean.” But it reminded me of a study Sir Ken Robinson shared in his Ted Talk “Do Schools Today Kill Creativity?” The study tested young people’s ability to think in divergent or non-linear ways, which is key for creativity. Ninety-eight percent of the age three-to-five children who were tested could. Yet those numbers dropped precipitously the older students were. Only 32% of the age eight to ten tested children could, and of the test subjects who were between the ages of 13 and 15, only 10% were able to think in non-linear ways. Sir Ken attributes the drop in numbers to an educational system that’s too often driven by single right answers. But anyone who’s concerned with these numbers might want to take a look at what Opal’s teachers discovered as they pursued their questions.

Finally, while I was at NCTE I snagged a copy of Battle Bunny, a new book by Jon Scieszka and Mac Barnett, with pictures by Matthew Myers. The book looks like a tattered Golden Book, with sweet illustrations and an uplifting message, that has been defaced and rewritten by the book’s owner Alex, who’s turned the original book’s main character Birthday Bunny into a chainsaw slinging rabbit.

Like all of Jon Scieszka’s and Mac Barnett’s book, Battle Bunny is hysterical, with all sorts of fun details to be found in the illustrations and the margins:

But here’s what I’d absolutely love to do: use the book as a mentor writing text and let students rewrite a real Golden Book with a partner or a small group to brainstorm the possibilities. Not only would that be enormously fun, but the critical thinking and problem solving opportunities would be huge. And I can’t help thinking that students would also learn quite a lot along the way about things like alliteration, word choice and the power of details in ways that could be lasting.

Of course, this means buying a dozen or more Golden Books and dealing with the ethical question of letting students go at them. But I have to imagine there’s a teacher out there who sees the same potential for learning in this that I do. If so . . . let me know!

As happened last year, many of the teachers, administrators and parents who left feedback on last month’s English Language Arts test at testingtalk.org pointed to what they felt were questions that focused on minutiae which, as Brooklyn principal Liz Phillips said “had little bearing on [children’s] reading ability and yet had huge stakes for students, teachers, principals and schools.” Most of those questions were aimed at assessing the Common Core’s Reading Standards 4-6, which are the ones that look at word choice and structure. Having not seen this year’s tests, I’m not in a position to comment—though if the questions were like the ones I shared from some practice tests earlier, I can see what the concern was about.

Most of the practice test questions associated with those standards were, indeed, picayune and disconnected from the text’s overall meaning. But I don’t think that means that thinking about word choice and structure isn’t important—only that the test questions weren’t very good. Word choice and structure can, in fact, be windows onto a text’s deeper meaning. Or as my colleagues Clare Landrigan and Tammy Mulligan have suggested, thinking about Reading Standards 4-6 can get us to Standards 1-3, which are all about meaning. And so this week, I’d like to apply Reading Anchor Standard 4—”Interpret words and phrases as they are used in a text, including determining technical, connotative, and figurative meanings, and analyze how specific word choice shape meaning or tone”—to three key buzzwords attached to the Standards—rigor, grit and productive struggle.

To me, all three seem to have strangely negative connotations. And in that, I’m not alone. Many educators have pointed out that, if we look up the word rigor in the dictionary, we find definitions that suggest something downright punishing. That’s why some educational writers, such as Stevi Quate and John McDermott, the authors of Clock Watchers, deliberately decided to use the word challenge instead of rigor in their most recent bookThe Just-Right Challenge. Others, such as former NCTE president Joanne Yatvin prefer the word vigor, which turning to the thesaurus this time, lists synonyms such as energy, strength, gusto and zing. Either or both of those words seem better than one connected to stiff dead bodies—i.e., rigor mortis. Yet rigor is the word that’s most in vogue.

The word grit is also popular today and is frequently touted as “the secret to success.” Yet it, too, has a whiff of negativity about it. Grit is what’s needed to get through somethingunpleasant, boring or even painful that someone else has said is good for you—like eating your vegetables or sitting through days and days of standardized testing. And as Alfie Kohn notes in his great piece “Ten Concerns about the ‘Let Them Teach Grit’ Fad,” grit seems connected to a slew of other terms, like self-discipline, will power and deferred gratification, all of which push students to “resist temptation, put off doing what they enjoy in order to grind through whatever they’ve been told to do—and keep at it for as long as it takes.”

Here, too, we could choose another word, like resilience, without the same connotations as grit, but we don’t. According to Merriam-Webster again, resilience focuses on “the ability to recover from or adjust easily to misfortune or change,” not just the stamina or toughness to trudge through it. And as former principal and speaker Peter DeWitt notes in his EdWeek blog post “Should Children Really Be Expected to Have Grit?“, resilience “can coincide with empathy and compassion,” whereas grit seems more about sheer doggedness—and in the case of vegetables and tests, compliance, which may be the word’s hidden agenda.

And then there’s the term productive struggle, which I confess I’ve embraced in the past, as an earlier blog post attests to. I believe completely in giving students time to explore and wrestle with a text in order to arrive at their own meaning because whatever is learned through that process—about that text, texts in general, and the reader himself—will stick much more than if we overly direct or scaffold students to a pre-determined answer. But that word struggle comes with the same negative connotations as the two other words do. The thesaurus, for instance, lists battle and fight as synonyms for struggle, with pains and drudgery as related words. And while I think we can reclaim words—such as turning the word confusion into something to celebrate rather than avoid—I’ve recently started to wonder if we shouldn’t choose a more positive word to get at the same concept, as you’ll see in the twitter exchange I had with two teachers after reading a blog post by the wonderful Annie Paul:

Merriam-Webster defines inquiry as “a systematic search for the truth or facts about something” and unlike the word struggle, which seems mostly connected to hardship and conflict, the word inquiry is connected to questioning, challenge and self-reflection. In fact, it seems to embrace the very habits of mind that NCTE has identified in their Framework for Postsecondary Success:

So what does it say about our culture that the words we’ve chosen to latch on to the most all seem to carry connotations of hardship, toughness and forbearance? Some writers, like Alfie Kohn, see this as simply a new manifestation of the Puritan work ethic—in a time in which it’s become much harder to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps. Others, like P. L. Thomas of Furman University, sees in the “‘grit’ narrative” something much more insidious: “a not-so-thinly masked appeal to racism”, with students of color being tagged as the ones most in need of more rigor, grit and time spent struggling.

In addition to these troubling implications, these three words also focus on student deficits, not on student strengths. And they suggest that we, as teachers, should be like Catwoman with her scowl and her whip, rather than like the Cat Lady who invites children to get to know the kitties. And I can’t help thinking that if, as a society, we chose some of those other words from the NCTE Framework instead—such as curiosity, openness, creativity and engagement—students would engage in productive struggle, even with something deemed rigorous, without explicit lessons on grit. And that’s because . . .

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To Make a Prairie

To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,
One clover, and a bee.
And revery.
The revery alone will do,
If bees are few.

Emily Dickinson

ABOUT ME

Call me a literacy jack-of-all-trades: a reader, a writer, a teacher, a consultant, a passionate lover of language and books, and a true believer in the power of stories to affirm and transform our lives. Here I follow Dickinson’s advice and attempt to make something out of reverie, sharing thoughts, reflections, ruminations and musings about reading, writing, teaching and the ways those all impact life.

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